Our panopticon is on track: Powered by artificial intelligence, Rekognition can identify, track, and analyze people in real time and recognize up to 100 people in a single image. It can quickly scan information it collects against databases featuring tens of millions of faces, according to Amazon. Amazon is marketing Rekognition for government surveillance. […]

I was so freaked out that I did something I hadn’t done since college: I joined a protest outside Clinton’s Manhattan office. No dice. Then, I emailed every single person I knew to send me a letter opposing the war. I printed them all out and overnight fedexed them to Clinton’s office in DC.

We call on the Democrats in Congress to oppose a war on Iraq, to vote “No” to Bush’s war cries. We pledge to never again vote for any Democratic member of Congress who supports George W. Bush’s war against Iraq. To the Democrats in Congress, we give you fair warning: You are either with us, or you are fired.

[…]

I did not support Clinton in 2008 for the presidency. As for 2016, unless there is a serious chance that a Republican would beat her, I will honor my signature on Moore’s petition.

I saw Hillary Clinton’s statement on her vote on the Senate floor and it didn’t sound like “gobbledygook and some of the most twisted rationalizations I have ever read”. No, I give that honor to John Kerry’s overly long statement on the Senate floor regarding the same resolution.

I think Clinton’s motives were pretty clear and I’m not going to rehash them here nor will I apologize for her. I was as adamantly against going to Iraq as Tristero and Michael Moore. You can ask my immediate family. They were hung-ho, Hadji kicking, peeing in their beds in terror over Muslims coming to kill them lunatics. We split up over it.

But I do have a problem with this sanctimonious “Lips that touch liquor shall never touch mine” bull from Tristero.

How come you guys were so Ok with turning the primary season of 2008 into a pro forma affair? I hold the vote as one of the most sacred institutions in the country. You know what happened. Without integrity in the voting process, it doesn’t matter if you go to war or not. The bad guys have already won.

Going into 2016, are we entirely sure we are going to have an honest primary season where a candidate that Tristero can bring himself to support has a chance of actually winning? Will that vote actually count for anything? I used to be a PUMA but consider myself a Democrat in Exile since the general election of 2008. Hillary Clinton has to prove herself all over again. My vote is not automatic. Will I have a chance to get counted this time, because Jon Corzine gave my primary vote away in 2008 in some kind of negotiated parley with the DNC that sounded like “gobbledygook and some of the most twisted rationalizations I have ever read” and I consider that the worst thing that has happened in American politics since Watergate.

I will defend Tristero’s right to vote for any self-righteous, preening, “Yes We Can!”, supposedly anti-war candidate he wants in 2016. Will Tristero allow me the same right to vote for whoever I want? Or is he going to call me a racist, stupid, and uneducated when I have a different set of priorities and set much higher standards for qualifications? Does my vote for “It’s the economy, stupid” have equal standing with Tristero’s desire to live like Gandhi? Will it be OK once more to just ignore my wishes and trash my vote because Tristero and his friends know better than I do what my priorities should be? What if I decide that women’s rights are more important this election cycle than LGBT rights? Will that be Ok? If we’re going to get a bunch of lefties crying and holding their breaths this early in the election cycle, it’s time we pushed back hard because they threw a fit and got their way in 2008.

And because of that, we got the most untested, overly ambitious, unready, president in the middle of the greatest economic catastrophe in 80 years. I and many of my former colleagues are still paying for that and will continue to pay for that in terms of diminished wages and savings until the day we die. Our children will pay for that. Women in general have been paying for that. Is there an American woman alive who can genuinely say that the misogynism unleashed by Democrats in the 2008 campaign season hasn’t affected them? And it was all very, VERY predictable. We predicted it throughout the campaign season with some very good logic and observation.

I can think of a lot of “the most dangerously stupid policy decisions any American president ever made”. For example, pulling out of Iraq before the country was stabilized in order to placate a bunch of noisy Tristeros before the 2012 election was dangerously stupid. Making Tim Geithner Secretary of the Treasury was dangerously stupid. After all, he’s the one who wrote the actual blank check for the finance industry in the form of trillions of our tax dollars. If we face another economic catastrophe because the financiers took greater risks, I’d say that was dangerously stupid. Bailing on homeowners might not feel so bad to Tristero but I’m sure the kids who lost their houses when the banks foreclosed on their parents would see it differently. There are a lot of dangerously stupid policy decisions that Obama has made that are going to affect all of us and make us a weaker nation for generations to come. But those decisions? Not a peep from Tristero and people like him.

We all have our lines in the sand. Tristero thought the war in Iraq was his, though I suspect he was pretty OK with voting for John Kerry in 2004. Can Tristero honestly look at us in the face and say that he held John Kerry to the same standard in 2004 as he holds Hillary Clinton in 2016? Call me very skeptical.

And I have mine. To me, anyone who schemes to deprive voters of their choices, substituting his judgement for theirs, doesn’t get my support. Ever. Because I don’t know who is behind that kind of sacrilege and nothing good comes from a bad seed.

Messing with the vote is evil.

One final thought: There seems to be some misperception out there that I am totally onboard with Hillary and I’m just being coy and my past as a PUMA just proves it. That would be wrong.

I’m not the head of any group and I don’t have any connections to the campaign. No one has approached me to officially or unofficially support a candidate. Maybe it’s too early for that anyway but in any case, I wouldn’t know how it’s done because I was never solicited in the past. All of my statements were purely voluntarily and not under the control of any candidate. I’m sure that didn’t always help the candidate but that’s what has happened in the past. I liked my independence.

Yeah, I could use ad money. I have tuition to pay and I’m a lot less financially secure than I was in 2008. I don’t have a good job with benefits anymore. I’m human and I would be sorely tempted. But what I really want more than anything else is a full time job making decent money, and health insurance that doesn’t cost me my entire paycheck and, in my opinion, the economy is in such desperate need of liberal economic policies that I am willing to wipe my slate clean and start with a fresh pair of eyes when it comes to candidates for 2016.

So, Hillary has to prove herself to me just like any other candidate. If she is a worthy candidate, she wouldn’t want it any other way.

Ignoring the cave troll above, I’ll say that was well said (as usual). I note Salon has announced Hillary is a “hawk” (horrors!). Of course that is only in a world where “hawk” and “dove” are the only choices, and if you don’t meet their definition of dove you must be a hawk. (And I can still remember when I believed lack of nuance was only a problem of the Right.)

Kinda sad, ain’t it?
In a way, it’s good to face this stuff early on. Unfortunately, the doves may protest too much and make themselves irrelevant. That would be a shame.
By the way, it looks like we have incoming like we did in 2008. I feel like a ball-turret gunner again.

Digby has kept comments cancelled at her blog so that her willing-captive audience won’t be exposed to any dissident thought. She writes well but remains a Dparty operative with a Kos-like political mission. So neither she nor Tristero nor spooner will have to be troubled by any of this. I speed-read Digby once every two-three weeks so I can sorta read the writing while giving her site the least hits possible.
If one considers her posts to be time-nonsensitive, one could stop reading the DigBlog altogether and just read its archived mirror at The Wayback Machine (Internet Archive). That way you can get all the Digby you want and she gets no bloghits at all.

Nah, they want me to take the bait. Women are conditioned to deeply feel it when it’s insinuated that they’re old, boring and stupid or lack certain virtues like honesty or lack of anger. (So unladylike.)
But I don’t give a rat’s ass. This is just a blog and as far as I’m concerned, I’m the supreme dictator and president for life on a planet of my own creation here. When the internet devolves to only this blog, maybe I’ll care. In the meantime, this is my planet and I make the rules and any attempts to shut me up or make me feel less than I am are non starters. I’ve got their number.

Yes, after the collapse, she was on news programs for about a week promoting a new deal style homeowners loan program. It would have been very different from the one obama eventually rolled out and the goal was to keep people in their homes and paying mortgages. There are several videos of her on YouTube talking about this. This is the approach that the authors of House of Debt say would have made a difference in the way our economy progressed since 2008.
As for advisors, Bill Clinton has admitted that he regrets listening to his former advisors. From what I understand, hillary was not a fan of summers or geithner and had included Joseph Stieglitz and one of the only respectable finance guys (whose name currently escapes me) as her campaign advisors. The guy whose name I can’t remember was the one who investigated Corzine and libor rates, iirc.
Anyway, isn’t there a saying, “once bitten, twice shy”?
I think it’s fair to say that Bill Clinton allowed experimentation and it paved the way for further disasters. But it was the bushies who underfunded the regulatory agencies.
In the end, the financiers who donated to obama’s campaign and helped put him over the top with the DNC saw that there was a difference between the two candidates. It was significant enough that no effort was spared to derail her candidacy. I have frequently compared it to obama being an enabler and Clinton being rehab and Wall Street wasn’t going to rehab.

If she does announce, only hope that she can make a convincing case to those who would otherwise opt for senator Warren, before a faux populist from the Republican party stakes out that ground. Party faithful aside, I think a lot of credibility has been lost on these issues. “Once bitten” also applies to those voters.

Way back someone surveyed the Fortune 500 CEO’s on who they would least like to see in the White House. John Edwards won and I said that’s who I will support. After Edwards penis-flamed, I supported Sen. Clinton. who came in second in the poll. Unless Jesus declares his candidacy on Wall Street, whip in hand, she will continue to get my support.

Funny how that is working out, isn’t it? It seems that there is a concerted effort to paint Clinton as a war lord. She could settle the whole issue now by just giving in and backing off her statements. But she won’t. You gotta wonder why that is.
But, yeah, let’s talk about the economy.

It’s getting so bad I don’t think even Hill can fix stuff now.. The top.0001 % want it all . They stopped her from putting them on a post Bush 2 diet in 08. They are now even more addicted to ever new hot and cold running wars and that 85 billion dollars the fed gives the banks every month. No sense talking school marms allowed to spoil the frat party wanted .

Seems to me if Hillary backs off,from anything, they would simply smell blood in the water and go after her even more . It’s a grave mistake for an actual Dem to apologize about 99% of the time . They would come back with she didn’t do it right! we demand more! … and it would never stop. She knows all this better than we can imagine

Struggling with Links, Blockquotes, images or videos?

Body: Last week I went down to Washington, D.C. to deliver a paper at a conference in the technical field where I worked, ten years or so and two or three careers ago, before the dot.com trash. The trip was solely an exercise in merit-making, since I doubt very much I'll get work in the field, but reconnecting with old friends was really great -- even […]

The Hill, "Court orders Iran to pay billions to 9/11 victims and families: A federal judge on Tuesday ordered Iran to pay billions of dollars in damages to the families of victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks." It's unlikely they will actually pay it, but the very idea that Iran should have to pay for an attack by Saudi Arabians is pr […]